• R is a language and environment for statistical computing and for graphics

• GNU project (100% free software)

• Managed by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.

• Community-driven

• Based on the object-oriented language S (1975)

• Aggregates all convenient information and procedures into one single place
• Allows you to work in projects
• Manages your code with highlighting
• Gives extra functionality (Shiny, knitr, markdown, LaTeX)
• Allows for integration with version control routines, such as Git.

• R works with objects that consist of elements. The smallest elements are numbers and characters.

  • These elements are assigned to objects.
  • A set of objects can be used to perform calculations
  • Calculations can be presented as functions
  • Functions are used to perform calculations and return new objects, containing calculated (or estimated) elements.

• Everything that is published on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) and is aimed at R users, must be accompanied by a help file.
• If you know the name of the function that performs an operation, e.g. anova(), then you just type ?anova or help(anova) in the console.

• If you do not know the name of the function: type ?? followed by your search criterion. For example ??anova returns a list of all help pages that contain the word ‘anova’

• Alternatively, the internet will tell you almost everything you’d like to know (and then some)

• Sites such as http://www.stackoverflow.com and http://www.stackexchange.com, as well as Google can be of tremendous help.
  • If you google R related issues; use ‘R:’ as a prefix in your search term

• Assigning things in R is very straightforward:

  • you just use <-

• For example, if you assign the value 100 (an element) to object a, you would type

a <- 100

• Life hack: In RStudio learn to use the shortcut “alt + -” (hyphen) to produce the left arrow <- in an R file

• Calling things in R is also very straightforward:

  • you just use type the name you have given to the object

• For example, we assigned the value 100 to object a. To call object a, we would type

a

## [1] 100

This is why we use R-Studio.